men throughout the world proceed from a like beginning; consist of, and are nourished by like elements, draw from the same principle the same vital breath, enjoy the same care of heaven, pass through life alike, and alike die."*

To which I shall only add, that, as Christianity is the most perfect kind of knowledge, it must essentially produce the most perfect kind of happiness. It is the golden everlasting chain let down from heaven to earth; the ladder that appeared to the patriarch in his dream; when he beheld Jehovah at its top, and the angels of God ascending and descending with messages of grace to mankind.

LECTURE XIII.

ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE.

In the last lecture, we continued our progress through that general history of science and literature, which we had commenced in the lecture that preceded it; and having, in the first of these studies, brought down the subject from the most celebrated times of Athens and Rome to the decline of the Roman empire, we waded, in the second, through the barren and cheerless period of the dark or middle ages, extending from the fall of Rome before the barbarous arms of the Goths, in the fifth century, to the fall of Constantinople before the no less barbarous arms of the Turks, in the fifteenth century-exploring our way as well as we were able, by the occasional guidance of a few transitory and uncertain beacons, amid the desolate realms of mental darkness and chaos by which we were surrounded, till we reached the auspicious hour in which the voice of the Almighty once more exclaimed throughout the dead and dreary waste, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!—AND THERE WAS LIGHT!"

The period of the revival of letters in Christendom is, in many respects, one of the most brilliant eras in human history. Without the intervention of a miracle we behold a flood of noonday bursting all at once over every quarter of the horizon, and dissipating the darkness of a thousand years; we behold mankind in almost every quarter of Europe, from the Carpathian mountains to the Pillars of Hercules, from the Tiber to the Vistula, waking as from a profound sleep to a life of activity and bold adventure; ignorance falling prostrate before advancing knowledge; brutality and barbarism giving way to science and polite letters; vice and anarchy to order and moral conduct; and idolatry, hypocrisy, and superstition to the pure simplicity of Christian truth. Hence, in some places, we trace the fall of feudal slavery and vassalage-in others of popish tyranny and imposition-and in every place a juster sense of relative duties and of the real dignity of man. Hence the origin of those important inventions, paper and clock-making, printing, telescopes, and gunpowder; and hence, too, the first insight into the modern doctrine of the circulation of the blood; and the wonderful discoveries of the mariner's compass, the sphericity of the earth's surface, and the revolution of the planets around the sun. Hence, Portugal, with a bold and adventurous canvass, doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and realized a maritime passage to India; Spain explored and established herself in a new world; and England, in the person of the intrepid Drake, for the first time circumnavigated the globe; while Galileo, by the marvellous invention and application of his telescope, unfolded to us not another world alone, but systems of worlds upon worlds in endless succession throughout the heavens; all which astonishing series of splendid facts and transactions, together with various others of early equal importance, crowd upon each other within the short period to which we are now confining our

• De Nugs Curialium; Harris, ii. 525.

attention, extending from the beginning of the fourteenth to about the middle of the sixteenth century. The heart of man seemed to beat with a new and more vigorous pulsation, and all the energies of the soul to be roused to the proudest darings of adventure.

In contemplating the causes of that wonderful change in the character and pursuits of civilized Europe, which this extraordinary combination of circumstances indicates, the following may, perhaps, be regarded as among the principal.

First, the natural spring or elasticity of the human mind, by means of which, though it may for a time be borne down by a weight of ignorance or oppression, it at length rouses from its torpitude, resumes its innate energy, and shakes off the vampire burden with a recoil proportioned to the pressure that subdued or stifled it.

Secondly, the sudden flight and dispersion of the best and almost the only literary characters of the age from the walls of Constantinople, upon the capture of this elegant and renowned city by the Turks, under the victorious banners of Mahomet II.

Thirdly, the taste for literature which, at this very period, was reviving in many of the Italian states, and more particularly at Florence under the illustrious family of the Medici; and especially the election of the celebrated Giovanni de' Medici to the pontificate, under the name of Leo X.

Fourthly, the facility afforded by the art of printing, discovered at the very period of the fall of Constantinople, to the diffusion of useful and polite learning in every direction.

And, fifthly, and, perhaps, chiefly, the general attention and spirit of inquiry which were excited throughout every country in Christendom, by the grand and eventful drama of the Reformation at this time exhibiting in Germany. Let us attend to each of these causes in the order in which I have stated them. I. Vice and ignorance are the necessary companions of each other: such is the immutable law of nature; and we can no more reverse it, than we can reverse the stars in their courses; and nothing can exceed the extreme to which both were carried during the period of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and to which the whole texture of the feudal system, and the abominations of the Vatican tyranny, equally contributed.

When the barbarous and intermixed tribes of Goths, Huns, and Vandals poured down in successive streams from the north, and overran the different provinces of the Roman empire, the conquered lands distributed by lot, and thence called allotted or allodial, were held in entire sovereignty by the different chieftains, without any other obligation existing between them than that of uniting on great occasions to defend the community. Additional tribes still succeeded:-wider tracts of country were subdued, and many individuals occupied land to a very considerable extent; while the king or captain-general, who led on his respective tribe to conquest, naturally acquired by far the largest portion of territory as his own share. These lands he found it convenient, in order to maintain his influence, to divide among his principal followers, merely subjecting them, for the grant, to certain aids and military ser

vices.

His example was imitated by his courtiers, who distributed, under similar conditions, portions of their estates to their dependants. Thus a feudal kingdom became a military establishment, and had the appearance of a victorious army, subordinate to command, and encamped under its officers in different parts of the country; every captain or baron considering himself independent of his sovereign, except during a period of national war. Possessed of wide tracts of country, and residing at a distance from the capital, they erected strong and gloomy fortresses in places of difficult access; and not only oppressed the people, and slighted whatever happened to be the civil magistracy of the state, but were often in a condition to set the authority of the crown itself at defiance.

As the tenure by which the lands were held was military; as there was no art or science to occupy the mind; as reading was seldom cultivated,

and writing a still rarer accomplishment; every landed proprietor was a mere soldier; and being expert and strong by the daily use of arms, was eager for an opportunity of showing his prowess. Nor was such opportunity ever wanting; for, when not employed in expeditions against a public enemy, he was commonly engaged in some petty enterprise at home, prompted by pride avarice, or revenge. Hence feuds, as, indeed, the term itself imports, were the peculiar characteristic of feudal power; vice and idleness were perpetually engendering animosities; gross ignorance disabled the different parties from adjusting them by the address of argument and fair reason; brutal obstinacy rendered them hereditary; and the son who succeeded to his father's estate succeeded also to his quarrels.

While such was the ready aid which the political system of the times administered to the gloomy reign of mental darkness and disorder, the gross misconduct of the church was still more instrumental in promoting the same direful effect. Although nothing is more clear than that, through the whole of this desolate period, God never left himself without a witness of the truth, the purity, and the power of the genuine doctrines of Christianity; although nothing is more clear than that, even in the deepest midnight of this desolate period, a few honest, zealous, and conscientious ecclesiastics, and even laymen, are to be met with who sedulously and manfully opposed themselves to the general corruption of their contemporaries, it is equally clear, that the great mass of the priesthood assumed the sacred habit for the mere purpose of indulging more effectually in the worst and most licentious passions and appetites; and surpassed all the rest of the community in the irregularity and scandal of their lives. Many of them were professed infidels, and exclaimed openly to each other, "Quantas divitias nobis peperit hæc Christi fabula!" "What wealth does this fiction of Christ obtain for us!" A sentiment generally ascribed to the free-thinking genius of Leo X., but which, whether ever uttered by him or not, was in frequent use long before his era; while nearly all concurred in the well-known motto that "ignorance is the mother of devotion."

In truth, it requires no ordinary stock of temper to wade through the scenes of abominable filth and barefaced hypocrisy which characterize the holy fathers of the church, as they were impiously denominated, at the period immediately before us. Crusades, indeed, had long been in use for the extirpation of infidelity, and there were occasional triumphs of the Cross over the Crescent; but, like most other pretensions to ecclesiastical zeal and devotion, even these had for the most part been perverted to the sinister purposes of avarice, temporal authority, or revenge; while plenary indulgences and remissions of sin, for given periods of time, or, in other words, formal licenses to live a life of unrestrained debauchery, and gratify every libidinous appetite and inclination for the term specified, had, during the existence of many crusades, been openly granted at the Vatican, as well as distributed for this purpose by its commissaries, all over Europe, to every one who would either consent to join the sacred standard in person or hire a substitute to fight for him. And similar indulgences were continued after their cessation, and were notoriously bought and sold at a settled or market-price.

This was strikingly exemplified during the papacy of Urban II. in the year 1100; while it is admitted by the warmest advocates of the Vatican that the famous fabric of St. Peter's church at Rome was paid for under Leo X. out of the same resources; which they venture to urge, indeed, in justification of the measure;* as though crimes could change their nature by the end for which they are perpetrated.

One of the fittest instruments for this traffic of abomination was the notorious Dominican inquisitor John Tetzel, who, true to his own trade, led so abandoned a life of debauchery that he was at length condemned to death by the emperor Maximilian for the crime of adultery, accompanied with very atrocious circumstances; and was saved from undergoing the punishment

* See Dupin, book ii. ch. i.; as also Roscoe's Life of Leo X. vol. ii. p. 150.

with great difficulty. He had the effrontery to boast that he had saved more souls from hell by his indulgences, than ever St. Peter had converted to Christianity by his preaching."

This juggler in iniquity, however, was at times himself out-juggled by others; and the following instance of his being overreached, as gravely related by Sechendorf, will show that the mummery of his trading was as ridiculously absurd as it was grossly nefarious. A man of some rank at Leipsic, who was disgusted with his villany, and determined to be even with him, applied to him for information whether he could grant absolution for a sin of a particular kind intended to be perpetrated, but to be kept a secret till the time. Tetzel replied boldly that he could readily do so, provided the payment were made equal to it. The bargain was instantly struck, the money paid down; and the diploma of absolution signed, sealed, and delivered in due form. The purchaser, thus empowered, waited quietly till Tetzel, having collected from Leipsic and its neighbourhood all the money he was able to lay hold of, set off for his home richly freighted. The man of absolution followed him right speedily; overtook him on the road; plundered him of the whole of his fraudulent gain, and, having beaten him soundly at the same time over the shoulders, produced his patent of absolution, avowed that this was the sin he had purchased leave to commit, and sent him back to Leipsic to tell his own story.

If we turn immediately to the Vatican itself, and observe the personal conduct of the direct successors to the chair of St. Peter, and of the sacred college by which they were surrounded, what is the picture which is unfolded to us? We behold pope fighting against pope, cardinals, in a multiplicity of instances, against cardinals; the former occasionally deposed, and the latter still more frequently strangled. We behold Leo X., when only an infant of seven years old, made abbot of the rich benefice of Fonte-dolce; a few years afterward holding not less than twenty benefices equally rich and valuable at the same time; and nominated to the grave and venerable college of cardinals at the age of thirteen. We behold Alexander VI., a near predecessor of Leo X., living incestuously with his own daughter, the loose but beautiful and accomplished Lucretia Borgia, a common prostitute to her father and two brothers; and we behold one of the brothers assassinating the other, and shortly afterward her legitimate husband, in the precincts of the apostolic palace, and upon the threshold of St. Peter's church, from a jealousy of their superior pretensions to her favour.† While, to close the whole, for it is disgusting to wade in such a slough of moral filth, we behold the council of Lateran inveighing with all its authority against the scandalous lives of many of its own ministers, who, not satisfied with living in a state of concubinage themselves, consented to receive the wages of iniquity, and sell licenses to the laity for the grant of a like indulgence.‡

But it may, perhaps, be said, that in these instances the soft and enervating power of an Italian climate, and the licentious habits which so peculiarly characterized the decline of the Roman empire, and which to the period before us had never been altogether eradicated, laid a foundation for vices which would not otherwise have been exhibited. Let us then direct our attention to a climate of another kind; let us turn to the hardy and proverbially virtuous inhabitants of Scotland, and proverbially virtuous, too, from the very nature of the climate itself: what was the effect of ignorance and papal superstition amid the corruption of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries upon the physical temperance and chastity of the Highlands? The following is Dr. M'Crie's account in his Life of John Knox, and which he supports by sufficient authorities:

"The corruptions by which the Christian religion was universally de

Roscoe, vol. ii. p. 104.

† Ib. vol. i. Subjoined Dissertations, p. 8–11.

‡ Quia verò in quibusdam regionibus nonnulli jurisdictionem habentes, pecuniarios quæstus à concubi nariis percipere non erubescunt, patientes eos in tali fœditate sordescere, sub pœna maledictionis æternæ præcipimus, ne deinceps sub pacto, compositione aut spe alterius quæstus, talia quovis modo tolerent, aut dissimulent.-S. S. Concil. tom. xiv. p. 302.

praved, before the Reformation, had grown to a greater height in Scotland than in any other nation within the pale of the western church. Superstition and religious imposture, in their grossest forms, gained an easy admission among a rude and ignorant people. By means of these the clergy attained to an exorbitant degree of opulence and power; which were accompanied, as they always have been, with the corruption of their order, and of the whole system of religion. The full half of the wealth of the nation belonged to the clergy; and the greater part of this was in the hands of a few of their number, who had the command of the whole body. Avarice, ambition, and the love of secular pomp reigned among the superior orders. Bishops and bbots rivalled the first nobility in magnificence, and preceded them in honours. They were privy-counsellors and lords of session as well as of parliament, and had long engrossed the principal offices of state. A vacant bishopric or abbacy called forth powerful competitors, who contended for it as for a principality or petty kingdom: it was obtained by similar arts, and not unfrequently taken possession of by the same weapons. Inferior benefices were openly put to sale or bestowed on the illiterate and unworthy ministers of courtiers; on dice-players, strolling bards, and bastards of bishops. -There was not such a thing known as for a bishop to preach :-the practice was even gone into desuetude among all the secular clergy, and wholly devolved on the mendicant monks, who employed it for the most mercenary purposes.

"The lives of the clergy, exempted from secular jurisdiction, and corrupted by wealth and idleness, were become a scandal to religion, and an outrage on decency. While they professed chastity, and prohibited, under the severest penalties, any of the ecclesiastical order from contracting lawful wedlock, the bishops set the example of the most shameless profligacy before the inferior clergy; avowedly kept their harlots; provided their natural sons with benefices, and gave their daughters in marriage to the sons of the nobility and principal gentry; many of whom were so mean as to contaminate the blood of their families by such base alliances for the sake of the rich dowries which they brought.

"Through the blind devotion and munificence of princes and nobles, monasteries, those nurseries of superstition and idleness, had greatly multiplied in the nation; and though they had universally degenerated, and were notoriously become the haunts of lewdness and debauchery, it was deemed impious and sacrilegious to reduce their number, abridge their privileges, or alienate their funds.

"The ignorance of the clergy respecting religion was as gross as the dissoluteness of their morals. Even bishops were not ashamed to confess that they were unacquainted with the canon of their faith, and had never read any part of the sacred Scriptures, except what they met with in their missals."*

It is not, then, to be wondered at, that, under so repugnant and scandalizing a state of things, notwithstanding the darkness and deformity of the times, mankind should in every part of Europe be growing ripe for a change, and that the still small voice of the conscientious few, who exposed and resisted the corruption around them, should be working with a wholesome ferment amid the general mass; that that elastic power of the human mind, which, in our own day, we have seen in Spain, in Russia, in Germany, and may yet, perhaps, see in France,† rising with indignant recoil against the domestic or foreign tyranny by which it had been long bowed down, should be swelling, and labouring, and maturing to the same effect, in the case before us; co-operating with the intrepid voice of Wyckliff in our own country, and with the ashes of Huss and Jeremy of Prague, that were not in vain sprinkled over the guilty soil of Switzerland, and effecting that important revolution, which reason, religion, and common sense equally vilified and insulted, equally called aloud for and sanctioned.

II. At this very period, in the year of our own era 1445, Constantinople, the ⚫ Life of John Knox, p. 14-20.

↑ The prediction is fulfilled. The passage was delivered, during the usurpation of Napoleon, in 1813